CHAPTER I

THE LONG JOURNEY AND THE LONGER ONE

The new vessel, gay with swelling scarves of bunting, ornamented from stem to stern with floating flags that kissed the breeze, rested easily on the stocks. The ways under her had been greased, the space before her in the river cleared. High on the prow her name _Merida_ shone in gold letters. Every eye was upon her.

Grimy faces looked from shop windows. The windows of the bending-shed, the blackboard-shed, the pipe-cutting shop, the sheet-iron shop, the joiner-shop, the brass-foundry,--all were filled with countenances blackened by labour. Similar countenances peered from the masts of vessels still in the slips, and from the heights of the immense travelling cranes and floating derricks. These gigantic and uncouth machines seemed to await the launch with an eagerness of their own. Had not each, in its own way, helped to fashion her--this marvel of a new ship?

The contrivances for drilling, chipping, caulking, blowing rivet-heating fires seemed to hold their breath, so unwonted was their stillness at this hour; while the mammoth pontoon, whose duty was still to be performed,--that of transporting the eighty-ton boiler a distance of one hundred feet and depositing it, a living heart, within the vessel,--the pontoon seemed to be lost in speculation.

The stocks gave no sign. Amid all the excitement of the yard, these great mother-arms of wood awaited stoically the instant when they must release their burden. All the morning a swarm of workmen had been busy loosening their tenacious hold on the new vessel.

"She'll go out at the turn of the tide," remarked a reporter; "that chap over there with an eyeglass will give the signal. He's launched over a hundred vessels, and never a hitch."

The newspaper artist to whom these remarks were addressed, scarcely heeded them. He was busy with his sketch. But an old man, standing near, caught the words and shivered ecstatically.

"She's a Ward liner to be used in the fruit trade between New York and Havana," continued the reporter. "Look, there comes the launching party now," he cried. "The messenger boy has the flowers,--and that's the girl who's to do the christening! She's the granddaughter of the owner. Rather good looking, don't you think?"

The old man turned squarely about. His stick shook in his hand. Excitement gripped him by the throat. He smiled broadly. The girl, accompanied by a bevy of friends, came forward. She was a slight thing, dressed in grey, and had about her neck a white feather boa, which fluttered in the breeze. Escorted by a man wearing a high hat, who helped her over the obstructions, she approached the new vessel, lifting blue eyes to the imposing height. A platform, reached by a slant of stairway and bright with red, white and blue bunting, had been built against the boat's bow. The girl's slim fingers grasped the railing, and followed by the rest of the party, she lightly ascended the steps.

Immediately there was a commotion. A score or more workmen, like elves, swarmed beneath the immense swelling sides of the boat, and with rhythmical strokes of sledge hammers, drove in wedges and removed the long pieces of timber placed in a slanting position against the ship. Thus lifted, the _Merida_ rested completely on the greased ways. Only one log now restrained the six hundred feet of her impatient length. Was it the mother's lingering hold?

Red below the water-line, black above, her new anchor turned to silver in the sunlight, the _Merida_ was without blemish, save for the spots left when the shores were hauled down; and these spots workmen, carrying long-handled brushes, touched rapidly with paint. At last all was in readiness and the dull sound of a saw passing through wood could be heard. The silence grew so deep that the word given by the man wearing the eyeglass was heard by the spectators. He spoke quietly; the saw passed through the log. The girl with the fluttering boa was seen to raise her hand; there was a shattering of glass, and with one plunge, one impulse of superb motion, the new ship slid down the ways. Swiftly, smoothly, she glided forward and the laughing water seemed to rise to meet her.

Instantly from an hundred throats a shout went up. The boats watching from the river began to whistle, the locomotives on the surrounding railroads shrieked shrilly. The workmen threw their caps into the air and followed as fast as they could along the line of the deserted stocks. The girl in the white boa waved her handkerchief. But the boats on the river had their own way. Shrilly, loudly, continuously, they tooted; while those still in the slips,--double-turreted monitors and squat battleships,--without bells, without whistles, without cannon,--by the very eagerness with which they seemed to await their turn, added mystically to the commotion.

_Free_! This was the one thought expressed on every side. It was as if man, by the intensity of his craving to escape bonds, communicated this desire to the objects of his creation. The impulse of the launching had carried the new ship to the middle of the stream, and there, hailed by the enthusiasm of the shore and the river, she floated, half-turning as if looking back coquettishly at the land; while over her a flock of birds, little specks in air, circled in an abandonment of freedom.

Amid all the tumult only one figure had remained without stirring. The old man with the stick in his hand was a stranger; until that day he had never been seen in the place. Yet, at the moment of the launch, he alone reached the highest pitch of exultation of which the human spirit is capable.

No longer conscious of his body, he laughed while great tears rolled down his cheeks and lost themselves in his beard. Suddenly, however, he looked at the ways covered with tallow which lay in folds now,--wrinkled like the flesh of the very old,--at the stocks lifting empty arms to the sky; and a change came over him. The sparkles died in his eyes, the eyes themselves seemed to sink back in his head. He lifted his hand. Then, after a wavering second, the hand fell.

"Ships," he quavered, speaking half to himself, half, it would seem, to the deserted stocks, "ships is like sons. There's no use clutchin' 'em or hangin' on to 'em. It's their nature to go exploitin' over the world. All we can say is, the Lord bless 'em, the Lord reveal his mighty wonders to 'em. Amen."

After this quaint speech, his spirit, which was the eternal youth within him, revived. Chuckling to himself, old David Beckett started on his homeward journey to Pemoquod Point on the Maine coast, a day's and a night's travel, by water and rail. His pilgrimage to Philadelphia, from every point of view but his own, had proved unsuccessful.

Five months before, David's son, Thomas Beckett, had disappeared from the Point and had gone to Philadelphia to work in the shipyards. Beyond the bald statement of this fact, which he left scrawled on the back of an envelope, young Thomas had never written a word home, though once he had sent a draft for a small sum of money. His was an impatient, gloomy spirit, easily depressed and easily excited. Life, indeed, either blazed in him like a devouring flame, or died down to a flicker which left him frozen and taciturn, with never a word on his thick, handsome lips, and no feeling in his heart, save, apparently, that of a fierce caged thing. In this mood when at home he had been wont to go about for weeks, leaving the care of the lobster pots entirely to his father, while he nursed his insensate wrath. Then, suddenly, the light would come. He would set about his work with savage joy, and with painful eagerness would read every book that came to his hand, from the Bible to a ten cent translation of a French novel. He would sing, he would lay plans. It was in this mood that he had gone to Philadelphia. When, however, his father followed him, bearing urgent news concerning the young fellow's wife, Thomas had again disappeared. Two weeks before, so old David learned, he had shipped as a sailor on an out-going vessel he had helped to build. But the father understood.

"I tell ye, Zary," he proclaimed the following evening in Old Harbour, as he clambered into the cart of his friend Zarah Patch, blandly ignoring the question in the other's face, "Philadelphy's changed since the days when I used to work in the car shops at t'other end of the town. There wa'n't any sech vessels built then. Double-turreted monitors and iron-clad battleships and cruisers that blaze with lights at night jest like floating hotels, all gilt furniture and white paint. Times has changed. Why some of them ships, when they was finished, they told me, would have as many as four engines apiece a-beatin' inside of 'em, to say nothin' of cylinders and twin-screws; and the fightin' ships would jest bristle with breach-loading rifles and Gatling guns. Think of the commotion they'll make when they're once finished, all them ships!" he concluded gleefully. "Yet there they stood, each in its stocks, quiet as lambs, helpless as babes unborn."

As David uttered the last words, Zarah gave him a sidelong glance, though he made no comment other than the sharp flap he gave the reins on the mare's back. He was not given to speech. Zarah owned a bit of ground on which he raised vegetables which he delivered to the summer hotel. He also carried what travellers there were from Old Harbour dock to Pemoquod. To-night David, the lobsterman, was his one passenger.

It was about seven o'clock of an evening in late summer, and across that bleak, barren bit of land the sun was just setting. As they drove along, it sparkled on the window panes of the houses and lit up the cross on the Catholic church; beyond the village it seemed to confine itself to the rocks by the wayside. It turned them a dull soft gold. A strong salt breeze was blowing.

Bony with boulders, the land reached like an eager arm into the sea, as if it would obtain somewhat. But beyond the dories of the lobstermen clinging close in shore and visible as the road ascended to a slight eminence, nothing told of any garnering whatsoever. On every side were wastes of long brownish grass, low shrubs and clumps of pines, that stood up stark by the roadside. Beneath the dark shade of the trees mushrooms and little clumps of shell were embedded in moss.

Of farms, strictly speaking, there were none, though the houses that revealed themselves occasionally as the road dipped and turned, had each its poor attempt at a garden. It was frankly a land of bleak striving, bordering closely on want, of roistering storms and sweet, enveloping fogs.

As David Beckett talked he raised his voice to a piping treble. Ships and the building of ships, this was his theme. And exalted beyond time and reality, he gave himself up to it, so that at last even Zarah was influenced. Its poetry began to work in his slower brain and his lips relaxed into a smile.

As the sun neared the horizon, the wind increased, and in every direction the shrubs bent before it with a writhing movement; and as far as the eye could see, an agitation ran through the coarse grass. From the sea came the steady moaning of the surf. It was as if the earth emitted heavy sighs; but for these two ancient men the burdens that weigh upon human life had ceased to exist.

The house before which they presently stopped was a gaunt frame structure with scarcely a trace of whitewash remaining upon its clapboards. Cold and exposed it turned its front door away from the road with New England reserve. A lilac bush grew under one of the windows. With every breath of wind it sawed against the sill. As David possessed himself of his carpet-bag and turned in at the gate with a wave of the hand, the sun, which until that moment had shone full upon this window, disappeared. Shadows and the old man entered the house together.

Flushed like Ulysses returned from his adventures, old David deposited his grip-sack in the entry and then cautiously approached his daughter-in-law's room. She lay there in a great bed with four posts, and in her thin fingers, she held a leaf of the lilac bush--a leaf like a green heart.

The old man peered in at her, pursing up his lips. He thought that his story would "liven Laviny up," and he was enjoying the prospect of relating it, when she turned toward him. She half lifted herself on her elbow. Her face was ghastly, her eyes shining. She looked past him; then fixed her eyes wildly on his face. But he shook his head at her and began speaking with soft jocularity.

"No, I didn't bring him, I couldn't; let me tell you how it was;" and he advanced smiling into the room. "Day after day as Thomas seen that ship he was at work on, grow up taller in the stocks; as he fitted them pieces of red tin unto her sides,--for Thomas was what they call a 'fitter-up', Laviny,--he had his thoughts. And you an' me, knowin' him, we know pretty well what those thoughts were. The long and short of it was, he couldn't stand bein' tied by the leg no longer. He thought how she would glide through the water, that great ship, of the lands she'd visit, of--Laviny!" he cried sharply, as with a gasp, she fell back on the pillow.

"You hadn't ought to act so," he expostulated; "you know he wa'n't marked the way he was fer nothin' with that little spot on his left cheek under the eye. His mother marked him that way before ever he was born, and we often spoke of its bein' jest the shape of the continent of Africky; and it's to Africky--"

A hoarse rattle drowned his words. He peered more closely at her with his aged eyes. And at that moment a faint thin wail came up from the other side of the bed.

He seized her arm while his tears fell on her wrist, which never quivered under their hot touch. "Laviny!" he cried, "Oh, he hadn't ought to have done it! Don't leave me alone with _it_--the little one!" he shrieked. "Why didn't you tell me it was here? Oh, Laviny, Laviny girl!"

But Lavina Beckett paid no heed. She had embarked for a stranger port and over stormier seas than any her husband had dared. The sound of the old man's sobs brought a woman to the door. Her figure surged with fat. One of her teeth projected when her face was in repose. She hastily approached the bed, but even she was awed.

"Don't make sech a noise," she said finally. "It ain't no use. You can't call her back now. If you could've managed to bring _him_, it would've been different likely. But you didn't. You never did manage, I guess, to do anything you set out to."

But the old man paid no heed. He sat with his hands on his knees, his head dropped forward, inefficient, old, broken down by grief, and a thin low wail for the second time broke the silence.